What is in the archetypal world of the Anglo-Saxons?

“It is not something that happens because people miss-interpret the text; it is because they believe in them. That is the problem.”~ Christopher Hitchens ~

Somehow stories contain the very soul of a people; when, for instance, American pastor Carol M. Noren meditated on the crossing of the Read Sea, saying that “God commands Moses to stretch out his hand over the sea,” and Moses obeys without hesitation, she infers the conclusion that, “Our Lord desires human participation in his saving history.” Adding that “the Almighty could certainly have parted the sea without Moses’ hand,” or performed a magician act of transporting “magically” all the children of Israel “in an instant.”

Carol has loosely played with the Exodus story in order to supply sermon materials on moral issues such like “obedience.” Here we see the personal factor in her thinking that didn’t permit her to make contact with the religious tradition of Judaism. I speak of contact rather than bound; bound would imply understanding of the entire historic Jewish past, which she perceptibly lacks.

In a spirit of naïve honesty, she describes ancient beliefs in the power of magic, which is in the collective unconscious of the Anglo-Saxon people since the earliest Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) that inhabited and ruled England from the 5th century ad to the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), collectively known as the Anglo-Saxons.

When you get right down to this, in her sermon, God is featured as “working wonders” in an almost exactly similar archetypical (folk or fairy) stories related to Merlin, the legendary wizard in the Arthurian legend. Indeed, it is not something that happens because people have miss-interpreted the biblical text (to quote Christopher Hitchens); it is because their archetypal disposition leads them to perceive and think the Bible in a way that is certainly personal and unrelated to the biblical events in themselves.

This is a stinking example of Jung’s psychological approach so reminiscent of psychoanalysis. Carol’s unconscious marred the archetypes of the Anglo-Saxons in her theology.

Note: the Anglo-Saxon people are the ancestors of the modern Christian American Fundamentalists.